Many Years On
by redex
Summary: Albus Severus/Scorpius. Draco introspective. Scorpius was his father son, and his father was an old man. Where had youth gone?


Draco Malfoy walked in on his son having sex with another man.

They hadn't even had the sense to close the door behind them, and with both facing away he could back out of the solarium silently and they never knew he was there. His mind was curiously blank until he arrived in his study and carefully closed the heavy oak door behind him. It was then that he allowed the knowledge of what he had just seen possess his mind.

His son, lean, unmistakable, naked and fucking a tanned, muscled, shaggy-haired boy over the breakfast table. Hard enough to make it shake, but with their hands clasped together against the wood. He felt like laughing and then crying and then throwing up, passing his fluttering, useless hands over his face as a sudden profound exhaustion crashed over him.

It wasn't even that his son was gay - this they had discussed simply but warmly the preceding Christmas holidays. Draco had seen the signs, knew all of them, and had told the boy to sit down in front of the fire after dinner and told him what he understood. About family, and trust, and responsibility, and most important of all, choice. A teenaged Scorpius had seemed stunned that his father, the most uptight and reserved man he'd ever known, could sit and quietly and lazily talk about sexual diseases, methods for discretion, and how to pay a prostitute. The boy was so sharp, so clever it almost scared Draco, and he had done his research, but reality was so very different from books and rumour.

Looking at him was like looking at an old photograph of himself, but with darker eyes, softer features, longer hair, subtler posture. Astoria had left her mark, but Socrpius was his father's son, and now, standing in his exquisitely furnished study, it was his father's chest that squeezed. He almost laughed at himself when he automatically touched his chest and drew his fingers away with a whispered charm to check to make sure it wasn't a literal heart attack. His boy was an adult and he was an old man.

But he still walked without a cane and reading glasses only made him look delightfully distinguished over his morning paper. When he sat down in the plush but straight-backed chair behind his desk and spread his hands over the leather desk mat he looked out the window at the finches on the hedges and allowed himself to realize that the body under his son's had been uncommonly similar to that one of one Harry Potter.

All he really had to have seen to know was the hair. No one else kept a spiky, disjointed mop like that, and Draco had spent too many years watching Harry Potter to not recognize it anywhere, even under the most istressful/i of conditions. He exhaled a breath he hadn't realized he was holding and allowed a small, tired smile crease his lips at the irony of fate.

He tapped what looked like a small standing woman's vanity mirror on the corner of his desk and when it clouded opaque said quietly but clearly, "Harry Potter".

There was a long wait as the smoke swirled in soothing patterns and Draco resisted the urge to drum his fingers, nor did his fingers go anywhere near his mouth, nor did he adjust his distinctly thin hair, but he did just briefly touch the sigil ring on his finger. He waited coolly and patiently, formulating his thoughts into succinct points that he was sure wouldn't last more than a few seconds once he saw that face on his screen because that was what happened when he talked with Harry Potter and always had. But for the sake of his sanity, he organized and aligned his thoughts into careful compartiments as he had done his entire life and felt himself watching himself, amazed at the deep and profound calm that had been over him this entire event. In the next room, his son was fucking his former school rival's son, a man he had hated for a significant portion of his life, and not only that, but the son of the richest, most powerful, and most influential wizard of their time. And yet, he was barely surprised, let alone angry or inclined to go demand an explanation. What had happened to the passion of youth?

He was only mildly irked when a receptionist came onto the glass in front of him and asked if he had an appointment. He said the words that he had heard his father say before him too many times to count: "Tell him it's Draco Malfoy calling and he will wish to speak with me". Usually those centuries of breeding were sufficient on their own, but this one was a tough little thing and looked over her glasses at him feigning disinterest. There had been a time when he would have charmed her or raged violently depending on his mood, but now he merely said, "Tell him it is regarding his youngest son."

She looked sceptical, but he kept his frosty gaze on her in a way that brokered no argument and she became a blurred sketch for a few moments, words spoken in the background in audible. She became visible again looking chastened but not inclined to humility; Slytherin, Draco guessed idly after she told him she was transferring him in.

He opened with: "I hope in the future you will put sufficient fear of the name of Malfoy into your assistants, Potter." This earned him a chuckle and a moment to assess. The clarity in these things was not fantastic, but Draco's mind's eye still saw Harry Potter as nineteen years old and the differences that age had wrought always threw him. The separation hadn't treated him as well as Draco's had him, but there had been a few fundamental differences in their marriages to begin with. Not something they were here to discuss now, he reminded his straying thoughts, and returned to the path he had laid out before himself.

"Something about Albus, Malfoy?" Harry prompted, not bothering to hide his concern as Draco would have. Draco himself merely wished he could pace while talking and shifted restlessly in his seat. Better to get to the point before the limits of the Gryffindor's small attention span was reached or thought he was just getting melancholy in his old age and wanted a familiar face to talk to.

"Were you aware that our sons are buggering each other senseless?"

A slight exaggeration, perhaps, but if they were brave enough to be doing it in broad daylight where anyone could walk in they certainly had to be comfortable enough with each other. Draco savoured the looks of surprise, mingled anger and confusion, and then reluctant acceptance as he always had; catching Harry Potter off guard not being something that he could do daily as he once did. Rather than a curse and a threat he got merely a long silence and then a slow shake of the head, though he noted how Potter's hands clenched on the desk in front of him into two fists and then unclenched and then clenched again. Twisting his ring idly he gave a slow smirk and tilted his head to the side slightly to indicate that he was being truthful here and was mutually thrown by this revelation. Potter cleared his throat and asked, "How do you know?"

"Saw them, just now," answered Draco. He neglected to elaborate, but Potter didn't ask for more detail, which surprised him. Potter _always_ wanted more details, perhaps he had learnt his lesson after all these years. But not everything had changed. He was clearly still processing and nearly knocked over an inkwell fumbling around uselessly doing the opposite of tidying up in his confusion. Really, he would always be hopeless.

"What - what are you planning on doing?" he asked finally, looking hopelessly like a deer caught in headlights. Fearless leader in battle, useless child in emotions. Not that Draco himself was particularly more experienced, but simply more sophisticated. "A while ago I told him his relationships were his own business, an experiment which I am now regretting. He is well aware of our history, no doubt he believes I would castrate him before tolerating him in bed with one of _your_ spawn," he replied with a grimace in Harry's direction who gave him a well-worn glare in return.

It was so easy to fall back into the old patterns. The banter, the taunts, the well-scarred old wounds. Harry twisted his wand between his fingers and some light sparks came flying out the end. He glared at it as if it had said something aloud and then turned that frustrated glare back on the Two-Way Mirror.

"Right."

And because Draco Malfoy knew Harry Potter like the back of his hand, he summoned his most haughty glare right back and pointed a finger at the determined image in front of him.

"Listen to me, Potter. Do not confront that boy." Salazar's bones, listen to him, giving parenting advice to the Boy Who Lived. His life was a giant cosmic joke, of this he was certain. But he continued because he knew he was _right_, even if he wasn't a perfect father either, and too few people were left in the world who would give Harry Potter a scolding. "If you _do_ it will be all shouting and flailing and he is not a bloody Gryffindor like you to fight it out and then go back to normal. He is a iSlytherin/i and for us, words matter. You will tell him that you love him the next time that you see him, and I will leave hints for my uncommonly clever son to pick up on and thus transfer to your surprisingly not unclever son the belief that he should speak to his father about his current relationship."

Even as he was speaking, Draco could see Harry struggling against the words, wishing to interrupt, and it took all of his considerable knowledge of the late Professor Snape's tactics to keep him silent until he was finished. And once he was finished, Potter had nothing to say, predictably enough, and only nodded twice, the first more uncertain than the second. "You're right," he said finally, quietly, and something nearing fondness reached into Draco's eyes and tugged on a smile. How he had struggled for so many years to get those words to pass through those lips. What age and experience had done to them couldn't have been done by anything else.

He ended the conversation with a suitably flippant _Ciao_ and sighed in relief as the mirror went misty and then reflective once again. He was sweating and sagging more than he had any right to be, considering how well he had just handled the situation, but it had taken its emotional toll. He wondered how Dumbledore, and then Snape, would have reacted. He wondered how his father would have reacted. He turned in his seat to look at the large formal portrait of his parents hanging on the side wall over the giant fireplace and thought perhaps he could detect the tiniest of scowls marring his father's haughty features, but he hadn't been in the habit of conversing on subjects of this nature with his father when he had been alive and he certainly wasn't going to start now that he was dead.

No, what he was going to do was to go upstairs, wash, change into a light suit for dinner, and tell the house-elves to prepare something with fish and alfredo and a full-bodied white wine. The two boys - whom he should have known were better than friends in hindsight - would be drawn by the scent of food after their exercise, as teenaged boys were wont to do, and Draco would divert talk to the direction of parents, expectations, and the nature of love. They would eat on the back patio, it was warm enough out with the stones charmed to radiate heat, and it would be a clear night if Draco's Quidditch eye wasn't wrong.

A week or two would pass and he would receive a not unexpected floo call from an assistant to an assistant to the Great Harry Potter for a lunch meeting, and then another when Granger was brought in as another expert opinion. Finally, they had dinner all of them together, four men, two well on their way into old age and the other two just blooming into adulthood. There would be a formal announcement from the sons to their fathers because Scorpius at least knew how to do things properly and Draco Malfoy would feel a very small facet of himself cry inside to see how fiercely they looked at each other in love. Outwardly, he only reached out and touched his son's arm as the two Potters embraced, but when they looked each other in the eye he found himself saying only, "You are my son."

He had tried so hard to be a good father and he wished now he had the ability to express his pride and love better. His son, his past, his future, ducked his head and then it rose again with a small, shy smile, and then turned back to his partner to hold hands under the table.

Draco felt old. His oldest enemy, perhaps his oldest friend, was sitting across the table from him, talking animatedly with their grown sons about plans for after Hogwarts. It was not an unpleasant feeling. All was well.


End file.
